Q – Hate and Fear Mongering on Social Media – Can you avoid this and tell your story?

I often read news stories from around the world and comments on twitter about them. What often ends up happening is that something happens in another country and people take the story out of context, or stretch the truth to a place of ‘oh they’re all like that’, or they do that all the time’. ‘What else do you expect from them?’

example –

• wars –
  They’ve been going on for most of our existence. If you tell the story from one side, they often end up looking like a hero or a villain. No armed conflict exists where one side did all the good or all the bad. Ever.

• The people of that country don’t always support the war effort. Or at least not all of the people do. It’s the govt’s decision to go to war, not the people’s. But 9/10 x the people face the consequences (ie sanctions) , including the blame.
• Which often leads to comments about something that isn’t directly related to whether or not they’re at war. Like the way they live in family, how they relate as couples, what religion they practice, clothes they wear, how that neighbour of yours who was mean to you was of that country, race, religion and this proves they make bad decisions ….etc

why is this important to notice?

People are using this conflict between two parties to justify their hatred/fear toward people, thinking they can get away with it.

And they dig in when you challenge their POV. ie They pull their buddies into the discussion and people from that country end up feeling really hurt when they see this crowd saying awful things. They might try to defend their nation/people/govt even when they disagree. And it escalates.

I don’t think such comments being tolerated by the poster should ever be allowed by media. Even on social media sites. And maybe their role should be just to post the story, then close comments. Say something to the effect of ‘war is bloody’ or ‘it takes two to tango’. It’s pretty rare when a country enters the battlefield alone. The events described don’t happen in isolation and few commentors know the whole story. Even if they live in that country.

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Leaders want political clout and sometimes they use aggressive tactics to get that.

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Sending young people off to war

• feeds the military machine
• and gets rid of poorer young people (best if they’re people the govt wants rid of – ie marginalized people are encouraged to participate)
• or at least gives them training in obedience and possibly job skills they can use after the war.

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Knowing that, shouldn’t we tread carefully when commenting about war? Or other things of equal weight? I think so.